Archive for the “life” Category
Nothing says “I love my baby” like a KFC portrait
Wednesday, December 31st, 2008
This was on the wall of a KFC by a highway in the Midwest. Finger lickin’ memories.
Obama picks Rick Warren (Yes on 8) for inauguration
Wednesday, December 17th, 2008Obama is clearly making as many symbolic efforts of inclusion as he can to govern from the center. Picking an evangelical preacher like Warren is part of that.
I find Warren’s support of Prop 8 cowardly and morally reprehensible.
And, like many queers, I am tired of being the one who has to “be bigger.” We know what it is to put up with ignorance and self-censorship to be “part of the family.”
But here’s the problem we face: we want a democracy that recognizes each of us as equals under the law. We say we want all difference acknowledged. We are not fundamentalists. This means we are always going to be stuck “being the bigger person” when it comes to dealing the evangelical and fundamentalist world within the democratic process.
If we really believe there is room in our democracy for us and them to both exist and be treated with dignity and be different, then our leverage comes from showing up without censorship. We can’t make it an “us or them” game and then claim our goal is democratic inclusion. Not because of how we feel about the immoral politics and “theology” of evangelicals like Rick Warren, but because of our own integrity. Because of what we stand for. We have to find as many ways as possible to make clear that they are wrong. To make our lives, our relationships, our marriages-illicit as they are now- as visible as possible.
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truth inside lies- Dusty Springfield Can I Get a Witness
Tuesday, December 16th, 2008It took a dyke in drag to sing black soul to allow white kids to feel they could move minimally.
Other than the bubbling honesty of the tune and the voice..what other shred of honesty is in this?
Maria Bamford: Greatest Living Comic Authority on Depression (Comedy DSM I ) Buy tix now for January 19th consult
Monday, December 15th, 2008
Above: the greatest living comic authority on depression: Maria Bamford
BUY TIX
Who: host comedian Heather Gold (“Cookie”), guests Maria Bamford (Comedy Central’s Comedians of Comedy), SF favourite Will Franken (Good Luck With It), and Cynthia Levin (Comedy Central’s “Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn)
What: The Heather Gold Show@SFSketchfest: Comedians on Depression at SF Sketchfest
When: Monday January 19th, 2008. 8-9:30pm,
Where: Eureka Theatre 215 Jackson St San Francisco CA 94111 and podcats online at heathergold.com/show
Tickets: $15. Way cheaper than therapy. Available at sfsketchfest.com or 866-468-3399
I’ve wanted to do this show since I looked in my wife’s psychology textbook under depression for information and it had a picture of Drew Carey and just said ‘Comedians are depressed.’ So now I’m consulting comedians. Only the best. These are the cream of the crop. It will be neurologically impossible to be depressed during this show. We may even cure a few therapists before the night is done. I hear they need help.
Who knows more about depression than comedians? Maria Bamford (Comedians of Comedy, Conan O’Brien, Jay Leno, Variety’s Top Ten Comics), Will Franken (Good Luck With It, Best SF Comedian), Cynthia Levin (Comedy Central’s “Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn) and surprise therapy guests join comic and host Heather Gold and you. Is it possible to be a comic without first being depressed? Are there Americans who aren’t depressed? These and other fine answers await your participation at Comedians on Depression. Will not cause drowsiness, bloating or leakage. Cheaper than therapy.
great singers/great comics: getting post-snark and getting heard
Sunday, December 14th, 2008I just read one of those lists magazines and blogs and VH1 like to make. The list always makes it easier to contain stuff. Not make life and our troubles and even passions seem like a tidal wave drowning us.
But I read the article: 100 Greatest Singers of All Time in Rolling Stone because I wanted to drown, no, swim in the joy of great singing. I wanted that feeling. That moving feeling of going someplace else altogether and being right HERE in my self. Finding my Self through the honesty. Safely held through the notes. But how to get that through words? I’m a comic and while it’s often said we all want to be singers, all we got are words. Where are the notes to hold us?
I was rewarded by some words in the very second piece. Billy Joel said this about Ray Charles, “When he sings, he’s not just singing soulfully. He is imparting his soul. You are hearing something deep within the man.”
I liked that bit so much I put the magazine from the coffee shop with me. I wanted to touch some of that.
It’s where I want to get. It’s what I’m working for. It’s what I love and admire in the performers who’ve inspired me.
Over and over in these pieces you hear the same things. Jackson Browne says John Lennon “always told the truth,” Bono says Dylan could “sing the most melancholy tunes and not succumb to sentimentality,” Booker T Jones says Otis Redding’s range was limited but it was “all intent….all emotion…[t]his guy is definitely not singing for the money.” These singers are “believed” and often more than that…felt. They make you feel.
They break down all that not wanting to feel people do. They give it company. And, I realized for the first time today, they don’t just comfort you by holding you, putting it out there just the way you feel it so you feel recognized. Seen. (“Yes, yes that’s it’s exactly Aretha. I’m feeling that thing.”) Nope, they are doing it with you, more than you. They are feeling that feeling 100% without some little string of irony holding them down to the ground and protecting them just in case someone might judge or criticize well, then they could always comfort themselves knowing they didn’t “really mean it.”
There’s no apology and irony in great singers. They’re not hiding behind the combover of snark. Any irony that comes only comes from the shame you feel about the world outside that’s making this piece of absolute truth washing over you the opposite of whatever we’re all forced to live with out there: a popular lie held in place by fear.
All comics want to be heard. All comics want laughter. But you can easily trade the latter for the former. And if they can’t see you. If the very reason you get on stage in the first place is that the genuine you is not seen, not reflected back, except in some deep song, well then you’re gonna get up there and make these people see you.
I learned so much playing with Margaret Cho not long ago. Because her heart is in it. “She’s not singing for the money.” She’s not hiding behind a wall of snark. She will take the room as far as they think their “edgy” asses will go, and then push them farther. And she’s got so much to go through to get the whole picture seen, to get all of her heard. And her fans love her that much more because she does that and she sees them. And she does it without notes to rest in.
Another comic performing that night who’s deservedly busting out, Ali Mafi quietly asked her backstage about playing audiences who dropped their love as soon as he came out to them. This was no complaint, so a how to. Cho didn’t miss a beat, “You’ve got to be funnier. You’ve got to make them.”
There’s no apology or irony in great comics. And comedy right now is populated by the alterna white boy snark which is a post all in its own for another day. The laughs are there to be sure. But what about the soul? What are you imparting?
I’ve been thinking about Cho’s advice it ever since I heard it. More you. Less fear. The closet isn’t gonna help. It’s the laugh and that’s gonna come from the truth. The truth getting bigger, not smaller. The truth that everyone, not just you, can recognize. It can make the impossible happen. It can get people over themselves. Out of themselves. To wail like Mary J Blige, to not back away from the truth even though you’re speaking it in words, like Richard Pryor.
But the only way there is to do it as your Self. That’s the constant search. That’s my aim. It’s a high high aim. I’m sure I’m failing it all the time now. But I’m not gonna stop trying.
great stand-up advice for any comic, or frankly, any creative person
Saturday, December 13th, 2008Right here via Jackie Kashian via Vanda.
While we’re at it, go see Jackie Kashian. All the smart chick comics I know dig her. I’m looking for chances to do it myself.
new furry earflap NY hat
Saturday, December 13th, 2008
My piece on vlogging airs on CBC’s Spark today
Thursday, December 11th, 2008I spend a lot of time going between coasts and between the online and offline “real” world. In order to bridging the geek/non-geek divide, I went to Port Jefferson Long Island to explain vlogging.
Listen 20 minutes in.
This is a short, This American Life-ish piece. And I stand by my assertion that within 5 years, so vlogging will be so commonplace, we probably won’t use that term for it anymore.
Feminism / web pwns Jon Favreau’s douchebag moment
Wednesday, December 10th, 2008
Jon Favreau, 27, the future White House Director of Speechwriting is the dude on the left.
He was at a party. Someone took this photo, for which he posed. Then it was posted to facebook.
The line between private and public is dissolving. It is the point feminism was making when it said “the personal is political.”
So Mr. Political here, Favreau (who will undoubtedly have to write a speech for Obama at some future time about the importance of women’s equality) has to deal with the consequences.
He’s free to express himself. And his bosses and we are free to have their opinion of him.
When ‘just having fun” “girls will be girls” gets trotted out as the cool excuse for douchebaggery with your work superiors, then we will have full equality.
